Plaxo e-cards: No Longer Useful

Well here's a marketing wiz wonder.  If you have a marketing niche that sets you apart from all the other companies that do the same kind of thing as you do ... do you maintain that advantage or do you give it up?

Plaxo used to have ecards that were sent directly to the recipient.  Actually, they were the ONLY service that did this.  All the other services would send a link to the card and your client or friend or family member would then have to click on the link or navigate to their site and then put in a code to pick up the card.  But Plaxo was different.  You could create a beautiful card and then click on send and the card went directly to your recipient.  Just that simple. 

But no longer.  Some braniac over at Plaxo decided it would be waaaaay better for the Plaxo site if people had to actually go to Plaxo to pick up the card.  Someone decided that it would increase their site traffic if all the recipients were forced to go to the Plaxo site.  Things that make you go "hmmmm?"  or maybe event "What?"

For the past 2 years, I have been telling everyone that they should get a Plaxo account so that they could use the ecard service.  Sadly, I can no longer recommend Plaxo e-cards as a way to follow up with your clients or as a way to stay in touch with your associates. 

I do hope that someone, somewhere will realize that there is a huge market out there waiting for this service to be available again.

I've googled in search of direct delivery e-cards and came up with no leads.  If someone out there knows of a service that provides direct to inbox graphical e-cards (no link, no access codes) please let me know.

Until then, handwritten cards are the way to go.

Comments

[Joe]

Zita - you say that you think handwritten cards are the way to go. What is your opinion of cards from Send Out Cards?

I've received a few in the past 10 days or so. They look pretty nice, but are never handwritten or even signed.

[Michele Catoire]

Joe,

I am a sender and distributor of SendOutCards and it is a wonderful service. You can actually have your own signature and personal font uploaded and use when sending out cards. I am happy to show you the service and offer you a free trial account to try it out, if you have not already. Michele Catoire
(206) 909-4114

[Zita Gustin]

Hey, Joe ... sorry I didn't reply sooner. Michele is right, you can make it so that any card you send from SendOutCards looks like it was actually handwritten by you. They've made an incredible amount of improvements to their system over the past year. I've been using SOC for nearly 4 years now and highly recomment it!

I do still like to send an ecard, though, for an immediate touch because that will show up in their inbox instantly, where the SOC card will take several days to make its way in the mail.

Because of that, I use both systems.